D-day

[lisekit]

So, yesterday was "D-day for the Arts", the day on which Arts Council England announced three-year funding for just over 600 organisations across England (Wales and Scotland have their own Arts Councils). It was a day of mixed news - good for some, who were funded for the first time or who had their funding increased; bad for others, who had their

Comments

[vardebedian]

I would as always find the argument that the arts are a general social good which deserve public funding more plausible if it was advanced by people whose livelihood does not depend on public funding of the arts

[lisekit]

if performance spaces were to run nothing but the two most popular Shakespeare plays.... the exposure of the public in general to the arts would be higher

Can you not already see the problem with this argument? Repeatedly exposing people to the same thing does not increase their engagement with culture. The exposure of the public to the arts would be lesser, and boredom has nothing to do with it.

and for less public expense

A quick comparison of the relative expenditure of the ROH and any midscale touring company should see you right on that.

[vardebedian]

Depends. If you think that currently everyone sees plenty of plays and reducing the number available would limit that, then yes. If you think - and I suspect this is more the case - that almost no-one sees any plays at all, then increasing the output of the few very popular ones might increase the population's exposure to culture. Now, that might get tired pretty quickly once every person had seen Hamlet say twice, so at some point it would be necessary to review the mix. But since the current mix is clearly determined not by popular demand but the whim of artists I'd be happy to see things go the other way for a while, just to see whether this public good which the arts apparently achieves could be increased by a different approach on the supply side.

I'm not sure what the comparison you make in your last line is telling me.

[lisekit]

It tells you you have a strange idea of what things cost. But I should add, the pure-economic argument for the arts is a strong one. People sometimes imagine that the arts in Britain are just a huge money-eating hole, but in fact they're net contributors to the UK economy

[lisekit]

If you don't mind me saying, that's a non-argument. What you choose to do with your spare time is your own business. There's no logic in my spending my evenings doing, say, balance accounting and then demanding to know why PWC don't pay me to do it, and this would appear to be directly equivalent.

If PWC would like to pay me to do balance accounting in the evenings, they are of course welcome, but I don't think that has any bearing on the issue of tax and spend.

[lisekit]

It's not in any way a value-judgment on your artistic output. It's simply that what you say above in no way addresses what I was talking about.